Memory, All Alone In The Moonlight…

One more thought from the weekend, which ties together two of my pathetically desperate loves, running Ultimate tournaments and watching Lost.

Something I mentioned in my tournament ramblings post is that Nationals is, by comparison with anything I’ve run before, a remarkably complicated event. The number of facts and thoughts that I had to keep up the air at the same time was quite daunting. Pulling it off was, I’m convinced, what left me so absolutely exhausted all week.

At the same point in time, though, while it was incredibly challenging, it was also quite exhilarating. The feeling of accomplishment I got seeing everything come together was, I imagine, much like that of an engineer who has designed a complex project, from start to finish, and now is watching it all run, in all its wonderful complexity.

In thinking about it a bit more, it’s not dissimilar to the feeling I get from watching Lost. The writers and producers have created such a crazy, complicated world. By certain standards, it can’t help but fail as an artistic project, because it’s simply too big and unwieldy. However, for someone who revels in knowing all those crazy facts and figures, and seeing all the myriad links between them, it’s pure mental enjoyment.

Lost is like trivia, only it’s even worse. At least, when I go to pub trivia, and I can drag out random facts like the name of the Governor of Montana (Brian Schweitzer, in case you cared), that’s the sort of thing which just might, in some circumstance, improve my ability to, say, be an American citizen. However, being able to see the rich irony in the way that Claire’s mom came up to Jack at his dad’s funeral, and then managed to reveal to him the fact that Claire was, in fact, his half-sister, and then, to top it all off, met and admired her own grandchild, a fact that she will probably never know?

Well that, my friends, is the joy of knowledge purely for its own sake.